Kevin Gardner
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A Hobby of Existence: on Dastidar, Sastry, Vince, & Winn
Kevin Gardner According to the randomness of the laws of the universe, or at least of the postal service, I will occasionally receive by mail, in quick succession, review copies of poetry books that have very little in common with each other in terms of form and subject. My instinct is to treat them separately,…
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From the shires: on Greening, Richardson, Branfoot, Self, & Nevett
Kevin Gardner Contemplating the literary significance of Huntingdonshire, that county that no longer exists outside memory and imagination, John Greening was reminded of all the poets who left their mark, perhaps none more poignantly than John Clare. “Clare’s poems,” he writes, “conjure the particularities of these clustered Midland shires, what is at our feet, the…
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Wit and wordplay: ‘After You Were, I Am’ by Camille Ralphs
Kevin Gardner Divided into three discrete units, Camille Ralph’s After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024) transports the reader into a warped revisioning of the seventeenth century. The first section recasts poems, prayers and scripture into a ‘Book of Common Prayers’. The second section, ‘Malkin: An Ellegy in 14 Spels’, comprises a set of dramatic…
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The sound of hope: ‘Before We Go Any Further’ by Tristram Fane Saunders
Kevin Gardner Imbedded in the heart of Before We Go Any Further (Carcanet, 2023) is a wickedly subversive sequence, “Five Songs on a Cruel Instrument”, purporting to contain translations of neglected medieval manuscripts – a ballad from the Anglo-Saxon, a Welsh elegy, an Irish drinking jig, and so forth. The songs, “translated” by the recently…
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Beauty before Age: on Seán Street, Michael Vince, & Tony Connor
Kevin Gardner The books reviewed here come from three well established and accomplished poets, whose first collections appeared, respectively, in 1976, 1978, and 1962. Unsurprisingly, all three opt for traditional structures rather than formal ingenuity, and no one is likely to use the word ‘ground-breaking’. Without the distraction of structural variation, however, the words themselves…
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Kingdoms of Earth and Sea: on Rishi Dastidar, Jane Draycott, and Ruth Padel
Kevin Gardner Three new and seemingly distinct collections by Rishi Dastidar, Jane Draycott, and Ruth Padel join their voices in opposing the kind of exceptionalism that deludes nations and their leaders to the climate crisis and their own impending ruin, that continues to convince some that Britain was chosen to rule the waves. British exceptionalism…
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A primer on the nature of hearing: on Seán Street’s ‘The Sound Recordist’
Kevin Gardner As Britain’s first professor of radio, Seán Street (emeritus professor at Bournemouth University) brings to the writing of poetry a unique perspective on sound. The author of six books on sound poetics, including Sound at the Edge of Perception and The Sound Inside the Silence, Street is a poet especially…
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Fifty Forty: on the incomplete histories of Carcanet and the LRB
Kevin Gardner One of the most pleasurable of readerly experiences is the subversive frisson of snooping into the conversational intimacy of an author’s letters. When the initial titillation of prying fades, however, we are left craving an indulgence. If only this invasion of privacy were permitted, encouraged even, by the letter writer.…